Chapter IV (1)

I. PEASANT-PROPRIETORSHIP IN THE VALLEY. II. LANDLORDISM. III. THE ERA
OF CAPITAL. IV. OBSTRUCTIONS TO THE FREE INTERACTION OF CAPITAL AND
LAND—THEIR EFFECTS, AND PROBABLE REMOVAL. V. CO-OPERATIVE FARMING
NOT A STEP FORWARDS

But what said Jaques?
Did he not moralise the spectacle?—SHAKESPEARE.

This chapter is to be a disquisition, after the manner of the philosophers, at all events, in its length, on peasant-proprietorship as now existing in the valley of Zermatt, or rather of the Visp; and on alternative systems. I do not invite anyone to read it, indeed, I at once announce its contents and its length, for the very purpose of inducing those who have no liking for disquisitions in general, or for disquisitions on such subjects, to skip it, and to proceed to the next chapter, where they will find the continuation of the narrative of our little excursion. My primary object in writing it was to ascertain, through the test of black and white, whether what I had been led to think upon these matters possessed sufficient coherence. I now, with the diffidence one must feel who ventures upon such ground, submit it to the judgment of those who take some interest in questions of this kind.

Bearing in mind that the subject is not a lively one, I will endeavour so to put what I have to say as that not much effort may be required to understand my meaning. From all effort, however, I cannot exempt the reader of the chapter, should it find one; for he will have, as he goes along, to determine for himself whether the facts alleged are the facts of the case, whether any material ones have been overlooked, and whether the inferences are drawn from the facts legitimately. He will not be in a position to allow what is presented to him to pass unquestioned; for he will be, himself, the counsel on the other side, as well as the jury.

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I. The figures I am about to use do not pretend to accuracy, or even to any close approximation to accuracy. Some figures, but what figures is of no great consequence, are necessary for the form of the argument, and for rendering it intelligible. If they possessed the most precise accuracy that would not at all strengthen it. Those I employ, I retain merely because they were the symbols with which, in my two walks through the valley, I endeavoured to work out the inquiry.

Suppose, then, that the valley of the Visp contains 4,000 acres of irrigated meadow and of corn and garden ground; and that each family is composed of husband and wife, and of not quite four children. The average here in England is, I believe, four-and-a-half children to a marriage. Marriages, probably, take place at a later period of life in the valley than in this country, and, therefore, the average number of children there will be smaller. Let, then, the grandfathers and grandmothers who may be living, and the unmarried people there may be, bring up the average of each family to six souls.

We will now suppose that the husband will require a pound and a half of bread a day, that will be about nine bushels of wheat a-year; and that the wife and children will require each a pound a day; that will be about thirty bushels more, or thirty-nine bushels in all. From what I saw of the land in the valley I suppose that it will not produce more than twenty-six bushels an acre. Whether its produce be wheat, or rye, or barley, will make no difference to the argument. An acre and a half will then be necessary for the amount of bread-stuff that will be required for each family.

A family, we will take a well-to-do one, will also require three cows. Deducting the time the cows are on the common pasture on the mountains, each cow will require, for the rest of the year, two tons of hay. That may be the produce of one acre of their grassland, for some of it is cut three times a-year, but most of it only twice, the second and third crops being light.

They will not want for their own consumption the whole of the produce of the three cows. A surplus, however, of this produce is necessary, because it is from that that they will have the means for purchasing the shoes, the tools and implements, and whatever else they absolutely need, but cannot produce themselves. The cows will then require three acres.

But we will suppose that by the use of straw, and by other economies in the keep of their cows, they manage to reduce the quantity of hay that would otherwise be consumed. This will set free a little of their land for flax, hemp, haricots, cabbages, potatoes, &c. The three last will go some way towards lessening the quantity of bread-stuff they will require. We may, therefore, set down the breadth of cultivated land needed for the maintenance, according to their way of living, of our family of six souls, at four acres.

The 4,000 acres will thus maintain 1,000 families. This will give our valley a population of 6,000 souls.

Here, perhaps, the rigid economist would stop. It would be enough for him to have ascertained the laws which regulate, under observed circumstances, the production and the distribution of wealth. But as neither the writer nor the readers of these pages are rigid economists, we will, using these facts only as a starting point, proceed to ulterior considerations. The question, indeed, which most interests us is not one of pure economy, but one which, though dependent on economical conditions, is in itself moral and intellectual; and, therefore, we go on to ask what kind of life, what kind of men and women, does this state of things produce?

In such a population, the elements of life are so simple, so uniform, and so much on the surface, that there will be no difficulty in getting at the answers to our questions. There is not a single family that has the leisure needed for mental cultivation, or for any approximation to the embellishments of life. They each have just the amount of land which will enable them, with incessant labour, and much care and forethought, to keep themselves above absolute want. Subdivision might, possibly, in some cases be carried a little further, but things would then only become worse. Towards this there is always a tendency. But, for reasons we shall come to presently, there is no tendency at all in the other direction. Intellectual life, therefore, is impossible in the valley. The conditions requisite for it are completely absent.

With the moral life, however, it is very far from being so. Of moral educators, one of the most efficient is the possession of property; the kind of education it gives being, of course, dependent on the amount and kind of property. For instance: the simplicity and gentility of a large fortune in three per cent. consols educates its possessor. It does not teach him forethought, industry, or self-denial. He may be improvident, idle, self-indulgent, and still his means of living may not be thereby diminished; nor will anything he can do improve them. Nor, furthermore, will the management of his property bring him into such relations with his fellow men, that, at every step and turn, he has to consider their wants and rights, and to balance them against his own. Nor will anything connected with his property teach him the instability of human affairs, for his is just the only human possession that is exempt from all risks and changes. Now the non-teaching of these moral qualities is an education, the outcome of which is likely to be a refined selfishness. An equal fortune derived from commerce, trade, or manufactures, teaches other lessons, almost we may say lessons of the very opposite kind. He, whose position depends on buying and selling, and producing, and on the human agencies he must make use of, on new discoveries, and on a variety of natural occurrences, will estimate life and his fellow men very differently from his neighbour, who has nothing at all to do except receiving, and spending his dividends. We are taking no account of individual character, and of the thousand circumstances and accidents, which may overrule, in any particular case, the natural teaching of either of these two kinds of property: we are only speaking generally; and are taking them as illustrations, with which we are all familiar, of a character-forming power every kind of property possesses.

Looking, then, at the property possessed by these Visp-side families in the same way, we can readily understand the moral effect it will have upon them. It will enforce what it teaches with irresistible power, because it will be acting on every member of the community in precisely the same way, throughout every day of the lives of all of them, generation after generation. Such teaching there is no possibility of withstanding. And what it teaches in this undeniable fashion,—undeniable because the virtues taught are to them the very conditions of existence,—are very far from being small moralities, for they are industry, prudence, patience, frugality, honesty.

Without industry their little plots of land could not support them; not the industry of the Irishman, in the days before the potato-famine, who set his potatoes in the spring, and took them up in the autumn, without finding much to do for the rest of the year; but an industry which must be exercised, sometimes under very adverse circumstances, throughout the whole twelve months. Every square yard of every part of their land represents so much hard labour, for nowhere has land been so hard to win. This fact is always before their eyes, and is in itself always a lesson to them. And this hard-won land, reminding them of the industry of those who were before them, has still, always, to be protected against the ravages of winter storms, and its irrigation kept in order. And every hard-won square yard must be turned to the best account. And all must labour in doing this. Their cows, too, require as much attention as their families. For them they must toil unremittingly in their short summer: they must follow them up into the mountains, and they must collect and store up for them the provender they will need in the long winter. And they must be industrious not only in the field, but equally in the house. They cannot afford to buy, and, therefore, everything, that can be, must be done, and made, at home. They cannot allow any portion of their time, or any capacity their land has for producing anything useful, to run to waste. There can be no fallows, of any kind, here.

With their long winters and scanty means, frugality, prudence, forethought, are all as necessary as industry. These are the indispensable conditions for eking out the consumption of the modest store of necessaries their life-long industry provides. If they were as wasteful, as careless, as improvident as our wages-supported poor, the ibex and chamois might soon return to the valley.

It is these necessity-imposed virtues which save the valley on the one hand from depopulation, and on the other from becoming overpeopled. Our labourers, and artisans, and operatives, who depend on wages, as soon as they have got wages enough to support a wife, marry. The general, almost the universal, rule with them is to marry young. The young men and maidens on Visp-side, not being dependent on wages, but on having a little bit of land, sufficient to support life, do not marry till they have come into possession of this little bit of land. Early marriages, therefore, are not the rule with them. The discipline of life, such as it is in the valley, has taught them—and a very valuable lesson it is—to bide their time.

Another virtue, which comes naturally to them, is honesty. The honesty of the valley appears to an Englishman unaccountable, Arcadian, fabulous. The ripe apples and the ripe plums hang over the road without a fence, for land is too precious for fences, and within reach of the hand of the passer-by; but no hand is reached out to touch them. Why is such forbearance unimaginable here? The reason is that, where only a few possess, the many not having the instincts of property, come to regard the property of the few as, to some extent, fair game for them. It is their only chance—their only hunting-ground. This is a way in which, without sanctioning a law which will act prejudicially to themselves, they can secure their share of the plums and apples nature provides. But, when all have property, each sees that the condition on which his own plums and apples will be respected is that he should himself respect the plums and apples of other people. This idea is at work in everybody’s mind. The children take to the idea, and to the practice of it, as naturally as they did to their mother’s milk. Honesty becomes an element of the general morality. It is in the air, which all must breathe.

Here then is a picture that is most charming. How cruelly hard has Nature been! Look at the cold, heartless mountains. Look upon their ice and storm-engendering heights. See how the little valley below lies at their mercy. Consider how, year by year, they fight against its being extorted from their dominion. Yet the feeble community in the valley, by their stout hearts and virtuous lives, continue to make it smile on the frowning mountains. How pleasing to the eye and to the thought, is the sight! And what enhances the charm it possesses is the sense of its thorough naturalness. There is nothing artificial about it; and so there is nothing that can to the people themselves suggest discontent. Their condition, in every particular, is the direct result of the unobstructed working of natural causes, such as they exist in man himself, and in environing circumstances. Whatever may be its drawbacks, or insufficiencies, they can in no way be traced to human legislation. How unwilling are we to contrast with this charming scene—but this is just what we have to do—the destitution, the squalor, and the vice, not of our great cities only, but even of our Visp-sides.

But, first, we will endeavour, by the light of the ideas we outside people have on these subjects, to complete our estimate of the worth of the state of things we are contemplating; of this oasis, the sight of which is so refreshing to those whose lot it is to be familiar with, and to dwell in, the hard wilderness of the world.

Its virtues are, doubtless, very pleasing to contemplate; but they are not of quite the highest order. The industry before us is very honourable. The mind dwells on the sight of it with satisfaction. But, as it only issues in the barest subsistence, the observation of this somewhat clouds our satisfaction. There are, too, higher forms of industry of which nothing can be known here—the industry of those who live laborious days, and scorn delights, from the desire to improve man’s estate, to extort the secrets of nature for his benefit, to clear away obstacles which are hindering men from seeing the truth, to add to the intellectual wealth of the race, to smoothe the path of virtue, and make virtue itself appear more attractive. Such industry is more honourable, and more blessed both to him who labours and to those who participate in the fruits of his labour. And such prudence, frugality, and forethought as are practised in the valley are very honourable, and the mind dwells on the sight of them, too, with satisfaction. But he who belongs to the outside world will here again be disposed to repeat the observation just made. It is true that that man’s understanding and heart must be out of harmony with the conditions of this life, and therefore repulsive to us, who does not gather up the fragments that nothing be lost, but when this is done only for self, and those who are to us as ourselves, though so done unavoidably through the necessity of the case, it is somewhat chilling and hardening. And it is not satisfactory that so much thought and care should be expended only upon the best use of the means of life—those means, too, being sadly restricted; for a higher application of these virtues would be to the best use of life itself. And so, again, with respect to their honesty. This is a virtue that is as rare as honourable; and the mind dwells on the sight of it with proportionate satisfaction. But its application to plums and apples is only its beginning. It has far loftier and more arduous, and more highly rewarded forms. It may be acted on under difficulties, and applied to matters, not dreamt of in the valley. It may rise into the form of social and political justice, in which form it prompts a man to consider the rights of others, especially of the most helpless and depressed, and even of the vicious, as well as his own; and not to use his own advantages and power in such a way as to hurt or hinder them: but, rather, to consider that it is due to their unhappy circumstances and weakness, that he should so use his power, and good fortune, as to contribute to the redress of the evils of their ill fortune.

Attractive, then, as is the contemplation of the moral life of the inhabitants of the valley, it is not in every respect satisfactory. A higher level may be attained. After all, it is the moral life rather of an ant-hill, or of a bee-hive, than of this rich and complex world to which we belong. And even if it were somewhat more elevated than it is, still there would remain some who would be unable to accept it, as worthy of being retained without prospect of change or improvement; and their reason would be, that man does not live by, or for, morality only. The worthy exercise of the intellectual powers is necessary for their idea of the complete man; and here everything of this kind is found to be sorely deficient. On the whole, then, in respect of each of the three ingredients of human well-being, a thoroughly equipped life, intellectual activity, and the highest form of virtue, we feel that something better,—with respect, indeed, to the two first something very much better,—is attainable, than what exists in the charming oasis before us.

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II. I now invite the reader to proceed with me to the consideration of how different economical conditions, such as our experience enables us to imagine, would modify the state of things we have been contemplating. For instance, suppose Visp-side were in Scotland or England, then its 4,000 acres might, and it is not unlikely that they would, be only a part of the estate of some great landlord. Let us endeavour to make out the effects this would have on its inhabitants.

The most obvious result would be that the population would be diminished by more than a half. At present the produce of the valley, with no very considerable deductions, is consumed in the valley. What is produced is what is required for supplying its large population with the first wants of life. But this will no longer be the case. The land will be let. We will suppose that this change has been completely effected; and that its irrigated meadows, with the contiguous little plots of corn-land, have been formed into farms, and that all is now treated in the way those who rent them find it pays best to manage them. We will suppose they have to pay a rent of 30s. an acre. The rent of the valley will then be 6,000_l._ a-year. How will this sum be made up? Cheese, of course, will be the main means. The young bullocks and the old cows will come next. We will take little credit for corn or potatoes, because it is evident that not nearly so much of them will be grown as was done under the old system; for much of the mountain corn-land will not pay now for cultivation with hired labour.

The economist, pure and simple, may say that this is all right. The course of events must be submitted to. Whatever they dictate is best; and best as it is. Interference with natural laws is always bad. The cheese and the cattle will sell for as much as they are worth. The sovereigns they will fetch are worth as much as the produce. There will be no diminution of wealth. But, however, it has to be proved that the new system is unavoidable in the sense of being either a natural step in the unobstructed course of human affairs, or, as some would tell us, the natural consummation of their long course, now at last happily effected. Perhaps it may be possible to show that there has been serious interference with their natural evolution; so serious as greatly to affect their character. And, if so, then the question of whether or no there has been any loss of value does not arise, for the antecedent question may render its discussion unnecessary. Be, however, these matters as they may, they do not cover all the ground we are desirous of investigating. We are thinking not of exchangeable wealth only, but also of men and women; and they, perhaps, may be regarded as wealth in its highest form; a kind of wealth, in which, if the men and women are not corrupt or counterfeit, but good and true, all may to some extent participate, and be the better for.

Under the system we are now considering, it jars against a sense of something or other in the minds of many, to see so much of the results of the labour of the people of the valley passing away from them, never to return in any form or degree. As far as they are concerned it is a tribute they are paying to the man who owns the land of the valley. And whether it be, year by year, paid to him, or whether all this cheese and all these cattle be every year on a stated day collected and burnt at the mouth of the valley; or the price, for which they may have been sold, thrown into the mid-ocean, would make no difference to them. They will get no advantage from it at all, for it is evident that a man who has an income of at least 6,000_l._ a-year will never live in the Valley of the Visp. He will, perhaps, have his mansion on the bank of the Lake of Geneva; or perhaps at Paris: at all events, it will be somewhere at a distance. The case of so many bales of calico being sent out of Manchester, to all parts of the world, is not similar. They are sent out for the very purpose of coming back again in the form of what will not only support those who produce them, but will also, if trade be good, increase the fund that supports the trade, that is to say, will increase the number of those who in various ways are supported by the trade: hence the growth of Manchester. Nor is it the same thing as so many quarters of corn being sent from America to this country, for in that case also the price of the corn returns to the hands of those who grew it. Their corn-fields have produced for them, only in a roundabout fashion, a golden harvest; and they have, themselves, the consumption of this harvest, precisely in the same way as the now existing Visp-side population have the direct consumption of the produce of their little plots of land. Some, of course, of the price of the cheese and cattle sent away will enable the farmers to live and to pay their labourers; but none of the 6,000_l._ a-year will come back in any form.

But the point now actually before us is the effect this change will produce on the amount of population. In order that the land might be let profitably, it was necessary to clear it of its old proprietors, for they could pay no rent at all. Their little estates were barely sufficient, with the most unremitting labour, and the most careful frugality, to support life. The valley has now been formed into cheese-farms; and we will suppose that for keeping up the irrigation, cutting the grass, tending the cows in summer on the mountains, and during the winter doing everything for them, and for cultivating whatever amount of land is still cropped with corn and potatoes, five men are wanted for a hundred acres. This will give for the 4,000 acres 200 men. Let each man, as before, represent a family of six souls. Here, for the labourers and their families, will be a population of 1,200. We will also suppose that, under the circumstances of the valley, the average size of the farms is not more than fifty acres. This will give eighty farmers. If their households average eight souls, we have 640 more. These, and the labourers, will not, as was formerly done, under the old order of things, by every family, produce themselves pretty nearly all that is necessary for their households. It will not be so, because the farmers, who must also attend to their farms, will require many things that none required before; and because the labourers, having to give all their time and strength for wages, will be obliged to buy almost all that they will require. This will necessitate the introduction into the valley of a considerable number of tradesmen. We will suppose a hamlet every five miles, in which, besides farmers and labourers, will reside eight tradesmen and petty shopkeepers. That is five hamlets, and forty tradesmen and shopkeepers. These, with six to a family, will add 240 to the population. These different contributories, then, will raise the total to 2,080. As the distances will remain what they were, and as there will be more stir and ambition among a population of farmers and shopkeepers, than there was formerly among the peasant proprietors, we will take the number of school-teachers as much the same under either system. The reduction of the population to one-third of its former amount will somewhat reduce the number of priests; but as thought will now be more active, and, therefore, more varied, this reduction will be counterbalanced by an increase in the number of prophets.

The next step in our inquiry is, how will this revolution affect the character of the population of the valley? We have seen that under the old system their whole character was the direct result of the fact that everyone was either the actual, or the prospective, possessor of a small plot of land, just enough to sustain the life of a family. That was the root out of which their lives grew; and their industry, frugality, forethought, patience, and honesty were the fruits such lives as theirs produced. That root is now dead. The conditions of life are different; and with different conditions have come corresponding differences of character. For instance, we all know that those who labour primarily for others, that others may make the profit that will accrue from their labour, are not so industrious as those who labour entirely for themselves. Nor will they have the same forethought, because their dependence is on wages, and wages require no forethought. Formerly forethought was a condition of existence. They are also now in a school which is a bad one for frugality and patience, and which is very far from being a good one for honesty. These, however, are still the main constituents of morality, for in them there can be no change, because morality is the regulative order of the family and of society: and now, with respect to all of these points, among the mass of the population, there is, necessarily a deterioration. Nor is petty trade, at least so says the experience of mankind, favourable to morality. As to those who hire the land, we will suppose that the more varied relations, than any which existed under the old system, into which they have been brought with their neighbours, and with the world outside the valley, have in some cases had an elevating and improving effect. The moral influences, however, of occupations of this kind are far from being universally good, because those who live by the labour of others, will in many cases be of opinion, that their own interests are antagonistic to the interests of those they employ in such a sense, that it is to their advantage to pay low wages, which means to lessen the comforts, and even the supply of necessaries, to those by whose labour they live. This may be an unavoidable incident of the relation in which the two stand towards each other, but it is not conducive to the result we are now wishing to find.

The intellectual gains and losses are harder to estimate. As to the labourers, one cannot believe that a body of men that has been lowered morally has been raised intellectually. Among the tradesmen class there will be some who will have more favourable opportunities for rising into a higher intellectual life than any had among the old peasant-proprietors. And among the small occupiers of land, for the farms only average fifty acres, these chances will, perhaps, be still greater. But all this will not come to much. The great question here is about the one family, for whose benefit mainly, almost, indeed, exclusively, the whole of the change has been brought about. This family now stands for 4,000 of the old inhabitants of the valley. One of the greatest of all possible revolutions has been carried out in its favour, for it is a revolution that has swept away the greater part of the population, and completely altered the material, moral, and intellectual life of all that remained. We will, however, suppose that they are everything that can be expected of a family so favourably circumstanced. That their morality is pure and elevated. That, intellectually, they are refined and cultivated. That they promote art. That science is at times their debtor. That among its members have been men who have advanced the thought of their day, and have made additions to the common fund of intellectual wealth; and others who have done their country good service in peace and in war.

When I say that this family stands in the place of the 4,000 who have disappeared from the valley, I limit the observation to the valley, for I do not mean that the population of the world has been diminished to that extent to make space for them, because the cheese and cattle sent out of the valley for their 6,000_l._ a-year, will contribute to the support elsewhere of a great many people who must work, and so live, in order that they may be able to purchase them.

But to return; those who were not satisfied with the original Arcadian state of things, we may be sure will not be satisfied with that which we are now imagining has taken its place. For nothing will satisfy them, if there must be a change, except some such condition of things as will work as favourably both for morality, and for intellect, as that did for morality alone; and which will, at the same time, provide, generally, a better supplied material life than that did.

We have now endeavoured, first, to analyze the land-system of the valley, such as it presents itself to the eye of a contemplative pedestrian; and which may be regarded as the natural working out of proprietorship in land, when it is the sole means of supporting life. We then proceeded to compare with this a system we wot of, carried out to its full-blown development. This second system is what people refer to when they talk of English landlordism. These two forms, however, of the distribution and tenure of land are very far from exhausting all that have existed, and that do and that might exist. Distribution and tenure are capable of assuming many other forms; and some of these must be considered before we can hope to arrive at anything like a right and serviceable understanding of the matter.

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III. The distinguishing feature of the economical conditions of the present day, and of other conditions as far as they depend on those that are economical, is the existence of capital in the forms and proportions it has now assumed. This has modified, and is modifying, the life of all civilised communities. It is this that has built our great cities, that is peopling the new world, that has liberated the serfs of the Russian Empire. It leavens all we do, or say, or think. We are what we are, because of it. The tenure and distribution of land, next to capital itself, the most generally used and diffused of all property, originally the only, and till recently the chief, property, cannot escape the influence of this all-pervading and omnipotent agent of change, which everywhere cuts a channel for itself, and finds the means for rising, sooner or later, to its own level. In some places it has affected land in a fashion more or less in accordance with its natural action; in other places in a fashion which has resulted more or less from artificial restrictions: but in some fashion or other it affects it everywhere; as it does all man’s belongings, and the whole tenor and complexion of human life.

Land, then, was the sole primeval means of supporting life. Over large areas of the earth’s surface it is so still. It was so in Homeric Greece—at that time the most advanced part of Europe—though we can trace in its then condition a certain indefinite nebulous capacity for the development of capital, the higher means of supporting life; and which capacity afterwards assumed its true form and action among the Ionians and other Asiatic Greeks, but above all at Athens: which accounts for the differences between it and Sparta: for it was the existence and employment of capital which made it the nurse and the holy city of intellect; while it was the contempt and the legislative suppression of capital which kept the Lacedæmonians, except so far as they were affected by the general influences of Greek thought, in the condition of a clan of splendid savages. And what obtained all but absolutely in Homeric Greece, obtained at that time, as far as we know, quite absolutely over all the rest of Europe. In the early ages of Roman history, Rome was a city of landowners; that is, of landowners living a city life. To understand this fact is to understand its early, and much of its subsequent history. It was so, also, with the neighbouring cities, in the conquest and absorption of which the first centuries of its historic existence were spent: they were cities of landowners. As we walk about the streets of disinterred Pompeii, we see that in this pleasure-city, even down to the late date of its catastrophe, it was very much so, although the capital of the plundered world had, at that time, for several generations, been flowing, through many channels, into Italy. That specimen city, as we may call it, of imperial Italy, appears to have been laid up in its envelope of ashes, preserved like an anatomical preparation, for the very purpose of enabling us to understand this luciferous fact.

I need not go on tracing out the subsequent history of land and capital, which would lead, again, to a comparison of the splendid savagery of feudal landowners with the revival of culture in the capital-supported trading communities of the Dark Ages; and their interaction upon each other: but will pass at once to ourselves. It is very possible now, at all events it is conceivable under the present state of things, that in a large English city—it is more or less so with almost all our cities—there may not be a single owner of agricultural land in its whole population: for I now, as I do throughout this chapter, distinguish land held for agricultural purposes from that which is held merely for residential, or commercial purposes. Here, then, is a difference so great that it takes much time and thought to comprehend its extent, its completeness, and its consequences. It belongs to a totally different stage of economical, and of social development; as complete as the difference between a caterpillar and a butterfly. The solid strength, the slow movements, the monotonous existence of the former represent the era of land. The nimbleness (capital is of no country), the beauty, the variety of life, but withal the want of solidity of the latter represent the era of capital. It is the wise combination, and harmonious interaction, of the two, which would, and which are destined to, cancel the disadvantages, and secure the advantages of each.

The revolution, that has been effected, is mighty and all-pervading. But because it has not been carried out by invading hosts, ravaged provinces, blazing cities, and bloody battle-fields, it is difficult to bring home to the general understanding that there has been any revolution at all. At its commencement it found those who owned the land of the country, not merely the most powerful order in the state, but quite supreme. It gradually introduced another order of men, those who own capital; and has ended by making them at length the most powerful; and so much so that now, whenever they choose to assert their power, they are supreme. Of course there ought not to be any antagonism between the two; but as there is unfortunately, and quite unnecessarily, an artificially created antagonism, there must be collisions and conflicts; in which, however, the supremacy must always eventually rest with the strongest.

The progress of this revolution ought to be seen a little in detail. Not an acre can be added to the land of the country, but to the capital of the country, already several times as much in value as the whole of the land, and supporting a greater number of lives, there is added a sum of two millions and a half of pounds sterling every Saturday night. We will note a few of the steps in the growth of capital. The year 1550 is very far from the date of the recognised appearance of capital in this country: it was even observed that in the previous century there had been an unexampled extension of commerce; but there are good reasons for supposing that the whole of the accumulated capital of the country at that time was less than one year’s purchase of the land. The land, at all events, was worth a great many times as much as all the capital amounted to.

In 1690 the purchase of an estate, of the value of 100,000_l._, was the wonder of the day.

In the next fifty years bankers were the chief, or only, large purchasers.

In the following half-century the Indians came home, and were added to the class.

Then, in the last half of the last century, came the manufacturers.

And now the most prominent capitalists, who become large purchasers of land, are the coal-owners, and the owners of iron-works, who, however, are accompanied by a cloud of contractors, engineers, merchants, brewers, Stock Exchange speculators, Australians, and even tradesmen, among whom bankers and manufacturers still hold their ground. Of course all of these classes who might, do not, become purchasers of agricultural estates; but those who do, show us in what direction we are to look for the great money-lords of the day. And if they are so many—there probably are at this time in Newcastle alone, in consequence, just now, of the prosperity of the iron and coal trades, five and twenty houses making, each, its 100,000_l._ a-year, how many must be the rank and file of the army of capital. The ratio then of capital to land has been completely inverted. At this moment there is disposable capital enough in the country to buy, at its present enhanced price, all the land of the country, three times over. And this stock of capital goes on increasing at the rate of 150,000,000_l._ a-year.

In the political order, we are indebted to capital for Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Gladstone, and for their policy; and we may suppose that the policy which capital may dictate will, henceforth, be the policy of every Government that will administer the affairs of this country. The land and the proletariat will never combine for the purpose of attempting to make it otherwise: for it will never be their interest to do so. Capital is both aristocratic and democratic in the best sense of each of these words. It is the cement, and the mainspring of modern societies, and, also, the ladder within them, without which there would be no rising from low to high positions.

And now let us go back to Visp-side, bearing in mind the ideas we have been working out. We will, then, suppose that by trade, and commerce, and manufactures, which are both the children and the parents of capital, other means for supporting life have become abundant in the valley. It is easy to make out what will be the effect of this on the dimensions of the, at present, diminutive properties of its one thousand families. Land will present itself to the minds of all as what it has really become; that is to say, as only one means among many for the support of life: the many others being the various forms in which capital works. The present subdivision, therefore, of the land will no longer be regarded as an obvious and undeniable necessity. It has, indeed, become only a secondary, and inferior means for supporting life. Those engaged in trade and commerce, it will be manifest, are many of them living much better lives than the petty proprietors. The old ideas and practices, then, with respect to land will melt away, and be utterly dissolved. The necessity for maintaining them has ceased; and they will cease to be maintained.

At the same time those who have acquired capital by trade, and commerce, and manufactures, will be desirous of investing some of it, perhaps a surplus their business may not require, in land, which must always continue to be the safest, and in some other respects the most desirable form of property. And many of those who have come to wish to retire from the labours and anxieties of business, will have the same desire. So, too, will some who are disposed to prefer agriculture to other kinds of industry; and who are, therefore, desirous of becoming possessed of sufficient land for their purpose, that they may apply to it their capital and intelligence, using it as the raw material of the manufacture towards which they are most attracted. Some will merely want a pleasant situation for a home for their families; some a little land around such a home to give them a little pleasant occupation. There will, we will suppose, be no artificial, as there are no natural, obstacles to all of these people buying what they have the means for buying, and the wish to buy; and using what they buy as they please. The properties thus formed will, many of them, be large, in proportion to the amount of surplus capital many will come to possess. But what will be remarkable, in this respect, will be, while the number of landed properties will be very considerable, the variety of their dimensions, which will be proportionate to the endlessly varying means of the multitudes, who in an era of capital will be desirous of investing in land, and the variety of uses to which they will be put in accordance with the varying wants and tastes of their owners.

And in these properties, whether great, or small, there will be incessantly at work two directly opposite tendencies. One in the direction of enlargement by inheritance, by marriage, and by larger increases of surplus capital, and of capital retiring from business. The other in the direction of subdivision, through the necessities, or the wishes, of their holders. These necessities may have arisen from the vicissitudes of business, the occurrences of life, and the extravagances and vices of their holders from time to time. Or the descendant of a purchaser may wish to capitalise his land, and take the capital back to business; or to place it in some investment more profitable than land. But, at all events, there will be no escaping from the natural, ever-felt, imperious obligation proprietors of land, like all other men, will be under, of providing for their widows and children. This will keep every estate in the condition of liability to subdivision; and must, at intervals, subdivide it. All these may be regarded as natural conditions. They are self-acting, and never-failing; and that they should lead to their natural issue, that is to the subdivision of landed estates, is in accordance with good instincts, in no way demoralising, and in every way healthy. Their free action exactly accommodates things to the requirements both of individuals and of the times.

What we are now contemplating is the state of things which will be brought about when the natural action of capital, and the natural action of landed property, have been left to take their own unimpeded course in the valley: for it is to the actual and the possible conditions of Continental Visp-sides, viewed in connection with the actual and the possible conditions of Continental cities, rather than to the broad acres and busy cities of wealthy England, that what I am now saying belongs, notwithstanding the appearance, which is unavoidable, of a constant reference to ourselves. Their case is not quite identical with ours, either in their existing conditions, or their future possibilities, as will be seen in due time and place, when we come to the distinct, and separate, consideration of our own case. Surplus capital, then, and capital withdrawn from business, will always be seeking investment: and as the land of a country is the natural reservoir for a large proportion of all such capital; and as every acre of land is, on our supposition, saleable, as much so as a sack of wheat, or a horse, though at the moment the owner may not be tempted by the price that would be offered for it; and as much of the land everywhere is always actually in the market, and on sale; the habit of looking to land as the safest both of temporary and of final investments, will become pretty general amongst all classes of people engaged in business. And amongst the holders of land, those who may wish to woo fortune by going into business, and to increase their incomes by investing the price of their land in some good security, will have nothing to withhold them from disposing of it. Estates, that are now in process of formation, will inevitably, when children have to be provided for, or upon the occurrence of any of those other causes we have already referred to, sooner or later enter upon the reverse process of subdivision. The great points to be kept in mind are that every acre, though it may not be actually in the market, is yet, at the will of its owner, marketable; and that, whatever may be the will of its present holder, must, sooner or later, come on the market; and that capital, availing itself of these facilities, naturally takes the direction of the land—in the long run, and to the majority of mankind, the most desirable of all investments; and that this maintains at a high figure the number of proprietors, that class which it is for the interest of the country should be as large as possible: it is obvious that this class will be large, in the era of capital, in every country where the land is within the reach of every man who has capital, exactly in proportion to the amount of capital he is desirous of investing in it.

This state of things appears to have some advantages. These may be summed up in the general remark that it is in complete conformity with the wants and conditions of an era of capital, such as that in which we live. Let us, however, endeavour to resolve this general remark into its constituent elements. As land is the most attractive of human possessions, the one possession which gives a man a place of his own to stand on in this world, it ought naturally to attract to itself much of the surplus capital of the day, and of capital that is being withdrawn from business. In the state of things, we have been just considering, there is no hindrance to the operation of this tendency. This flow of capital towards the land will make it far more productive than it ever has been under any other system. For capital is nothing in the world but bottled-up labour, reconvertible, at the will of the holder, into actual labour, and the implements and materials and products of labour; and this system secures the advantage that the proprietors shall generally be men who have much capital in proportion to their land; and much of this capital will, of course, be applied to it. More land will be reclaimed, more rocks blasted and buried; irrigating canals and cultivation will be carried higher up the sides of the mountains; and more costly means of cultivation applied than are possible under either the peasant-proprietor system, or the large estate system. And this may be a state of things which will not dissatisfy the economist.

It is a state of things which the modern statesman, also, ought to regard with approval; because the possession of land has always, everywhere, been the conservative element in human societies; and the wide diffusion of the proprietorship of land is the only effectual means by which the statesman of the present day can hope to balance, and neutralise, the disturbing action of the large aggregations of population capital has called into being in the great commercial, and manufacturing cities of this era of capital. It ought to be a pleasing, and reassuring sight to him to behold streams of capital and of proprietors constantly flowing off from them towards the land: for in these streams he knows that power is being drawn off from those terrible centres of possible disturbance, which cause him so much anxiety; and that what is thus drawn off from them is being added to the conservative elements of society. So that if the order of society, or any valuable, but, at the moment, misunderstood, institution—misunderstood because things are in an unnatural state—should have to sustain a shock, there would be less power on the side of those who might originate it, and more on the side of those who would have to bear the brunt of it—a state of things which would, probably, prevent the shock from ever occurring. Whereas to array on one side the land of a country held by a handful of proprietors against on the other side numbers and capital, is both to invite the shock, and at the same time to forbid the existence of the natural means for resisting it.

Many great cities are terrible centres of possible disturbance, just because there are artificial barriers which keep asunder the land and its inhabitants on one side, and the cities with their capital and population on the other side. If things were so that streams of those who had had the energy and intelligence requisite for success, and had succeeded, were constantly flowing off from the cities to the land; and back-currents of those, who were desirous of seeking fortune, flowing into the towns from the country; and this is what ought to be the state of things in an era of capital; there would be less opposition of interests and sentiments between the town and the country: they would together form more of an homogeneous system. If the town populations could be brought into some kind of connection with the land, they would then, so far, have given hostages, a material guarantee, to social peace, and order.